Two unrelated but nonetheless telling bits of information came to me today.

First, the Irish, being as they are not team players, just had to run the Lisbon Treaty past their citizens, even though every other EU nation was smart enough to limit the decision to their respective elite Eurocrats. It turns out the Irish, upon reflection, aren’t too keen on ceding their remaining sovereignty to Brussels, as the treaty ratification was voted down with extreme prejudice.

As an American, albeit an unusually politically active one, I don’t have a very firm grasp on European politics, but I can’t help but compare the EU with the formation of my own country back in the late 18th century. The thirteen colonies were all pretty independent, and our first attempt to organize into a nation, the Articles of Confederation, failed due to an excessive lack of cohesion.

I’ve commented before on the vision of the near-future I grew up with, reading Wired, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, et al. In my teenage years, I looked eagerly forward to the near future, when the vision of a Utopian cyberspace would become a reality, whether the institutions of the old century liked it or not. Of course, living as I do in the near-future, I know better.

I’ve ranted before about the fight against drunk driving expanding into a de-facto fight against drinking at all, with due process and the Fourth Amendment as collateral damage.

Today I ran across a Reason magazine Hit and Run posting calling attention to four DWI-related abuses of police power and presumption of guilt. Of particular note to me is the first item:

As all the Establishment nerds who read Slashdot already know, the EU Commissioner of Justice and Security recently suggested EU-wide censorship of searches for ‘dangerous words’ like ‘bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism’. No word yet on the legal status of searches for ‘tyranny’, ‘censorship’, or ‘authoritarian thug’.

The exact quote is:

A while back I pointed out a great piece in Reason Magazine about the increasing use of the public health bludgeon to regulate and constrain individual liberties. That article wasn’t available online at the time, but now you can read it here.

In Part I, we learned of the heroic work our brothers in ICE are doing to protect the homeland from terrorist mod chips. In this installment, we’ll explore the consequences when a large, powerful central government criminalizes law-abiding moviegoers at the behest of an entertainment industry stuck in the past.

In case you thought a large, powerful central government only sucked for drug users and gun nuts, prepare to reap the whirlwind. Slashdot reports ICE agents raided 16 homes for mod chips, supposedly made illegal by the DMCA, which the Founders would’ve written into the Constitution itself if only they could foresee rampant piracy of Backstreet Boys and Metallica albums.

Not surprisingly, two of the most consistent enemies of individual liberty in the US Senate, Senators Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AL) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI) have called for US government monitoring and filtering of the Internet, to protect The Children.

I just received my April issue of Reason Magazine, which has a great cover article titled An Epidemic of Meddling: The Totalitarian Implications of Public Health . Unfortunately Reason doesn’t make the latest issue available on their site until a month or two after publication, so I can’t link to the article itself.

The VCDL list just called my attention to the Virginia House of Delegates HB 2943, which passed out of committee and is headed for a floor vote. I’ll let it speak for itself: